Some of the There There

Panorama into the late-afternoon Sun from high in the Mountain View Cemetery, across Oakland, toward San Francisco. (Except as otherwise noted, all photos taken on April 6^th, 2008.)

Gertrude Stein lived in Oakland, California, in the years 1878 through 1891. Those years spanned most of her childhood (she was born in 1874 in Pennsylvania), and she left Oakland as a young woman, after her parents died, ultimately to become a priestess of the avante-garde in France.

She didn’t return to Oakland until 1934, on a speaking tour. She later wrote of that visit to her old neighborhood that There is no there, there, which has irritated everyone who cares about Oakland ever since. In context, it was simply a preciously economical way of saying that the old neighborhood just wasn’t the same as the one she loved, but out of context it became something erudite for snooty San Franciscans to toss with a sneer at their neighbors across the Bay to the East.

Hear, hear! They're there. Adam at the Stein stone, Mountain View Cemetery, April 9th, 2008. (Photo by Andrew Rusca.)

Detail in the above image. When I asked Adam yesterday to get a picture of that particular gravestone, I didn't tell him why. I didn't have to. That's how strongly Gertrude Stein's little bon mot still hangs around Oakland.

My sons grew up in Oakland, too. Adam lives there now, and Doug’s memorial bench is in a lovely Oakland park. They never separated themselves from the place, maintaining a strong, sometimes almost fierce, allegiance to it.

As well they should. Oakland is only partly what its negative reputation would have the rest of the world believe it is entirely: poverty, crime, and strife afflict parts of the city, certainly, but no more so than they do any other major American city. It’s the Oakland you never hear about that ties Adam so strongly (and, to a slightly lesser extent, ties me, too.)

Can you hear me there? Adam on his cell ‘phone in front of a house I lived in for a few months in 1976.

This photo shows one of the places in Oakland I have called home. The house was divided up into several tiny apartments; in 1976, I lived in the room with the bay window right behind Adam. Adam’s first bicycle was hidden down behind the house as a surprise on his 6^th birthday, and his and Lynda’s apartment is within about 75 yards of this place.

The Harrington family’s springtime gathering has been at Diane's and my place in the redwood mountains for the past several years, but this year Adam and Lynda invited us all to their apartment on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. The plan was to have a light lunch of sandwiches and then go on up the hill to Montclair Park to visit Doug’s bench.

Adam, Lynda, and Andrew set up the lunch goodies.

As the extended family gathered, it struck me (as it does all us old geezers) that kids grow up so fast:

Grace of the wondrous hair of many colors.

Kiana and Diane. Kiana was little more than a week-old infant when her Uncle Doug’s bench was dedicated; she’s nearly a year old now.

There, there, she doesn’t bite.

Lynda, Adam, and Andrew’s cuddly pet, Hairy, seemed to enjoy the gathering, too. I guess. Far as I could tell. Without touching her.

After lunch, we caravanned up to Montclair Park:

Lynda’s daughter, Jamie, and her new husband, Hector, on Doug’s bench.

Left to right: Grace (seated), Adrianne, Diane, Adam, Hector, Jamie, Reva, Andrew. Lynda and Kiana are hidden behind Hector and Jamie.

The wonderful old tree that used to be directly behind the bench from this vantage point had to be taken down a few months ago. Adam has plans to plant a replacement on Doug’s birthday, October 1: a Douglas Fir. I have no doubt that he can make that happen.

This was not a somber pilgrimage – all the kids had tons of fun:

Andrew gets good metal on a ball (but I still have problems with bats that say “clink” when they should say “whack”.)

Kiana and Grace a-swing…

… and Reva had a good time on the swings, too! No sense letting the kids have all the fun.

After we returned to Lynda’s and Adam’s apartment, we split off into different groups going in different ways. Adam and I went back up into the hills, but this time into a place that both he and I have enjoyed over the decades as a peaceful, beautiful place for solitude and reflection: the Mountain View Cemetery, where Daniel and Amelia Stein rest, just a block up the street from Adam’s current place and my old one (the latter pictured in this entry’s second illustration, above.)

The shared but separate experience that Adam and I have of that place was detailed in this earlier blog entry illustrated with some of Adam’s photos. The facility is enormous, old (by California standards, anyway), and magnificently designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who was also the landscape architect for New York City’s Central Park.

In My father’s house are many mansions: Detail of “millionaires’ row” in Olmsted’s masterpiece.

As in Central Park, Olmsted here incorporated pre-existing natural features into his overlaid order.

The empty Livermore plot revisited, with Adam demonstrating its subtle message. I have no idea at all why there is a vastly out-of-season pumpkin in the background.

So, to take one more cheap shot at Gertrude, there is a lot of there there in Oakland, at least for Adam and me. But, trumping that, is the lots of who There, and years of events that are entwined with There, and the ongoing continuum of being that we all have brought to There and continue to grow through There.

Thanks, Adam, for everything on this day. And for the rides. (As far as Adam and I can remember, this day was the first time he had ever driven a car with me as a passenger, and he did it twice with two different vehicles. I figured that I should let him take the training wheels off before he turns 38.)

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[Note in production: this post was actually almost ready to publish last night, when Ryan called with news of yet another soul born into this extended family. I decided to postpone putting this up so that Casey could have the day all to herself on SherWords.]

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News Flash! Update with Picture!

Casey and Ryan, April 9th, 2008. (Photo by granny Diane.)

Casey Rose Vickers was born shortly before midnight last night (April 8th) to Ryan and Christel Vickers, Diane's older son and his wife. Casey is their first child, a healthy baby girl, 6 1/2 pounds, and took her time arriving -- 30 hours of labor.

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Another Excursion to Oakland's Disneyland

In his most recent blog entry, Brian Fies says, "Honestly, I think I divide other people's work into three categories: 1.) I could do that. 2.) I wish I could do that. 3.) Wow, I have no idea how they did that." Diane and I categorize all glass art as a 3+, and are fascinated by it. (We also have a lot of it around the house, which is probably not the smartest thing in the world for people who have six cats and three dogs.) Above, Diane visits our favorite glass-art shop in Sausalito, Petri's, in 2002. Photo used with her permission. At least I think "I don't care" constitutes permission.

I wish I could remember where I first heard San Francisco referred to as "Oakland's Disneyland," but it's an apt tag in a sardonic sort of way. "The City" (as its citizens often call it*) is a little square of treasures and surprises, abutted on three sides by water and graveyards on the fourth, isolated, suave, kinky, cosmopolitan, goofy, and always charming. It is a great place for a getaway, as it was a great place to work for 17 years.

This week was spring break for me, and Diane and I motored off to Oakland's Disneyland twice. The first time was Wednesday, to visit our old friend, Lucile, and another of my co-workers from those 17 years whom I hadn't seen in more than a decade. On part of that visit, Lucile showed us a little treasure that I hadn't seen before: the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden at the foot of the Dutch Windmill at the far western edge of Golden Gate Park. After I'd muttered at myself for a while about not having brought my camera, Diane and I decided that we'd just drive back up the next day and do some more of the tourist thing. It's an easy drive, and even with gas prices the way they are now, the round trip from Ft. Harrington only costs about 30 bucks.

So we did.

Here are some snapshots from yesterday's outing:

Our first stop was a place that has been a topic here before: the Legion of Honor Art Museum near the Golden Gate. Our main aim there was to visit the Annie Liebovitz exhibit ("A Photographer's Life, 1990 - 2005"), which was well worth the drive all by itself. No pictures here from that exhibit, though: photographing the photographer's photographs was strictly forbidden, possibly because the Museum was concerned about potential effects on the spacetime continuum of inadvertent infinite recursions. But a couple of things that I could take pictures of were just remarkable.

Dale Chihuly's Sun in the Legion courtyard.

Chihuly's Sea Blue and Green Tower in an interior exhibit room.

The Legion of Honor's sister museum, the de Young in Golden Gate Park, will have an exhibit of Dale Chihuly's remarkable sculptures later this year. As part of the lead-up to that event, four of his large glass works have been installed, two in each of the Museums. In the Legion, they were Sun and Sea Blue and Green Tower, both above. They are massive works of blown glass, and Sun is also a neon light! You can see it illuminated by clicking here to go directly to a well-hidden (it seems) page in Chihuly's massive website (but please come back.)



Details in Sun. Click on any image to see a larger version.










As we were leaving the Legion of Honor to go on to our next destination, we were treated to an accidental piece of performance art.

Oakland's finest at a Frisco museum.

A group of seven Oakland motorcycle police officers pulled into the parking area and carefully backed their bikes into position for a photo to be taken of them with the stately pillars and arches of the Legion in the background. As I was taking the photo above, Diane (standing closer to them than I was) heard one of them say, "Somebody should write down all the gay stuff they make us do."

I'm pretty sure he thought that Diane was laughing with him. Silly boy. I was tempted -- but only for a split-split second -- to tell him that if he actually went into the museum, he could see lots of pichers of nekkid wimmin! Of course, he probably knows how to use the internet, so it wouldn't have been worth the effort to him, anyway.

The next destination. Somebody should write down all the gay stuff Diane makes me do.

The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park actually has an astronomical tie-in. Its constituent parts were purchased by James Lick, who endowed Lick Observatory. Those parts were still in crates when he died in 1876, so the Conservatory (like the Observatory) wasn't constructed until after it would do him any good personally.

The attraction on this day at the Conservatory was the butterfly exhibit -- not insects mounted on pins in cases, but freely flapping around in the entire western end of the Conservatory. We had a great time there for an hour, giggling like little kids (of whom there were may real ones scooting around) as the colorful littler guys flitted around.

On to the final stop:

The Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden, Golden Gate Park

Our final destination was the tulip garden we had seen, briefly, the previous day. The little patch was named after Queen Wilhelmina (1880 - 1962) of the Netherlands -- and so was my paternal grandmother. The tulips are at the height of their display right now, as you can see above.

The Dutch Windmill.

The tulip garden is at the foot of the "Dutch Windmill," one of two large pump drivers that were erected in the early 1900's to supply fresh water for the huge expanse of greenery atop sand dunes that is Golden Gate Park. The windmills are at the far western edge of the Park, facing the beach, and the nearly constant strong wind off the Pacific allowed, through them, the park to become what it is today: one of the greatest urban parks in the world.

Meanwhile, back at the Fort...

... it's time for the first rosebuds ...

... and for apple blossoms ...

... and for the bees to get to work. Clicking on this picture to see the little guy hard at work upside-down will be worth your trouble.

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* "The City" is so ingrained a nickname for San Francisco that the Warriors NBA team had that as its only locale designation on their jerseys for many years. Now, of course, they use the milquetoast "Golden State" abomination, which makes them sound like a college team from Colorado. (Photo copied from an ad on eBay; I have no idea whom to credit.)

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Lookit What I Got in the Mail Today!

[Recommended listening while reading this post: "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.]

My friend ronniecat visited Cuba recently, and sent me a souvenir from her trip. When I opened the package, the first thing I saw was the box -- a delightful recipe box with a chicken theme, appropriate for Ft. Harrington. Inside the box was the brown baseball, which ronnie described thusly in her note that accompanied the package:

"... I bought this at a market in Old Havana [...] these had wooden balls at the core [...] when Cubans play 'beisbol,' this is typical of what they're playing with, though this is a step up, as store-bought, from 'I made it myself' balls!"

Unknown to ronnie, after the box, and after the ball, a whole series of memories came tumbling out of the brown paper package:

When I was a little kid in Upstate New York, I loved the game of baseball, and I was enchanted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose games I could hear on the radio. I was a chunky, awkward little kid, though, and wasn't very good at athletic enterprises:

Little League tryouts, spring, 1958. I'm the kid throwing at the target.

When I was 11 years old, I tried out for Little League. I was one of the few kids who didn't make the cut for any team at all. I was crushed. My Dad was inspired.

He built a number of training facilities around our home in the backcountry, including:

Hand-eye coordination wall, 1959

... this "bounce-back" stone wall and flagstone terrace. Its function was to improve my fielding abilities by providing unpredictable ricochets which trained me to react to batted balls quickly (very quickly, since I was to use a tennis ball, not a baseball), and...

Batting cage, 1960

... a batting cage, where he would pitch balls to me from the regulation 60 feet, 6 inches away. He enticed me to learn to switch-hit by having me simulate the Dodgers' (by then in the faraway land of Los Angeles) lineup according to whether the hitter was right- or left-handed.

It became clear pretty soon, though, that hitting wasn't going to be my strength, so we switched to pitching. By 1962, he had trained me to throw accurately enough that I could do pretty well in summer-league competition:

Me pitching for the Norwich Masons against the Sherburne town team, 1962

By then, I was in high school, and the goal was to be a pitcher for the Norwich Purple Tornado. Dad's training went into high gear. My athleticism was still meager, but I was a strong, chunky guy, and Dad knew a thing or two about leverage. In the summer of '62, he had me throw over and over again with a prop that engaged my best assets (ahem), husky thighs and a big butt: a folding chair placed right in front of me. By having to kick my left leg over the back of that chair, I learned to bring maximum force into my pitches, and eventually developed a nasty fastball. Poor Dad, the batter in all this training, developed quite a colorful left side that summer from all the bruises. Velocity, he could train me for -- accuracy, not so much. Unfortunately, I can't find a picture in his slide trove of the infamous chair.

Fireballer in training, 1963

All of his and my efforts paid off in 1964, my Junior year in high school. I made the varsity team, and was their ace starting pitcher for that one season. There is not a single picture of that chapter. Dad couldn't stand to do anything but sit on the back rail of the bleachers while I was pitching, anxiously chewing on his fingernails, and he never brought a camera to any of my games as a varsity pitcher. I did okay, not great, because I still couldn't accurately guide my pitches -- I still hold the league record for hit batsmen in a season (primarily because the league dissolved the next year, but still...), and the Catholic kids who batted against me would cross themselves before every pitch.

The coach was a former minor-league pro player who knew some scouts, and (I think as a favor to my Dad, but I don't know for sure) he brought in a Yankees' scout to watch one of my games. His advice to me after the game was blunt: I could throw balls past high school kids, but there was no way I could ever do well even in the low minors, so I should concentrate on my studies.

So I did. And I never played organized ball again after that season, but I wasn't bitter about it at all. I pretty much knew that was the case, anyway, and Dad and I had already proved that I was better than somebody who couldn't make Little League!

More importantly, Dad and I had worked on something important together, for crucially formative years for each of us, and had accomplished much more than baseball alone could account for.

Veterans' Park, Norwich, New York: the home field of the Norwich Purple Tornado

I took the last picture in the summer of 2001, when I made a pilgrimage back to Chenango county to scatter my parents' ashes in the nearby Whaupaunaucau forest, across Thompson Creek from the little house I grew up in, and its hillside lot where Dad built the batting cage and all the rest. The little grandstand looked bigger when I was playing earnestly there, and you can see the corner rail, high up in the back, where Dad sat and gnawed his fingernails so many years ago.

Thank you, ronnie. Thank you so very, very much.

[Coda: the title of this post is meant to echo the one you can see by clicking here.]

Announcement: New Blog for Pix [Updated]

The Murphy Gang, Atlanta, 1946 -- Top row: Catherine (my mother), Carolyn; Middle row: Joseph Charlie, Edith, Ophalon; Front row: John Calvin, Tom, Ed.

I've just initiated "SherPics," a repository for daily pictures from the Harrington archives. Probably of most interest to family, this new blog will feature snapshots from my Dad's and my archives. The intent is to post snapshots on the day of the year on which they were taken, or, if a specific date can't be determined, at least within the month of their origin.

Here's the link.

UPDATE, March 28:
At JannieP's inspired suggestion, the new blog has been re-titled "PicShers." I can't tell you how much I wish I had thought of that! The address remains http://sherpics.blogspot.com , though.

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Annual Renewal Notice

For SherWords' readers in the snowy climes of Maine, Michigan, and New Brunswick (to name a few if not all), I am happy to tell you that relief is on the way: spring has sprung its notice here in Ft. Harrington, and will be wafting its way to you posthaste. It says here.

This afternoon I took a little stroll around the compound and snapped these shots of things sprouting, budding, and blooming in the yard (click on any image to see a larger version):

Lilac...

... plum (with buds looking remarkably like tiny Brussels Sprouts)

... peach ...

... apple ...

... and jasmine sprouting brand-new, so briefly-red leaves.




The camillia trees have been blossoming since last month, but they're just now hitting their full stride, producing a wealth of blossoms too heavy for their stems, which fall on the deck with an audible PLOP at all hours, in...

... white ...

... red ...

... and pink.

The spaniels, hard at work watching me this afternoon.


In another sense of annual renewal, today was Diane's and my 17th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with dinner at the Shadowbrook Restaurant in Capitola (or "Capitola-by-the-Sea" as its chamber of commerce would like -- just to make sure, I suppose, that we don't think it's Capitola-by-the-Forest or Capitola-by-the-Reactor.)

The most enjoyable way to reach the restaurant's entrance is by a steep cable car down from the parking area.




Delightful place, delightful meal, and a delightful 17 years.






And in yet another sense of renewal, and in yet another delight, Diane's older son, Ryan, and his wife, Christel, are expecting their firstborn, a daughter, next month.

Alnitak loved the cradle we got for them, and was not happy when we took it away to the baby shower last week! (This photo was taken last Saturday, and is the only one in this post not taken today.)

Happy renewal, everybody!

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